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India short of nuclear
goals
By David Isenberg
Avul
Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam, a 71-year-old scientist,
Muslim, best-selling author, amateur musician and
generally revered as the father of India’s nuclear
missile program, will be sworn in on Thursday for a
five-year term as India's president.
While the
office of Indian president is mostly ceremonial, it does
carry some power, including the authority to call
elections or decide which party has an opportunity to
form a government. If parliament reaches an impasse over
an issue, the president’s verdict is final.
Kalam, the third Muslim among India's 11
presidents, was elected on July 18 by the country’s
legislators, receiving nearly 90 percent of the votes.
The newly elected official has said that nuclear
weapons act as a deterrent to war, but he says that he
would not send warlike signals as president and that
India would show the world "technology is going to be
used for development of the nation".
The new
president is hoped to help heal the wounds from some of
the nation's worst Hindu-Muslim bloodshed. Analysts said
that India's coalition government, led by the Hindu
nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), chose Kalam to
try to bridge religious rifts and silence criticism of
its handling of Hindu-Muslim violence in Gujarat state
in February and March.
A best-selling author, he
functions as a kind of nationalist self-help guru who
vows to use science, technology and nuclear and space
research to allow India to develop, assert itself and
achieve greatness. He has emerged as a cult figure since
he helped oversee India's successful nuclear tests in
1998. His latest book, Ignited Minds: Unleashing the
Power Within India, blares his can-do, nationalist
message. "India has to be transformed into a developed
nation," Kalam said after being elected, "a prosperous
nation and a healthy nation, with a value system."
Born on October 15, 1931, in Rameswaram, a spit
of land that juts out between Madras and Sri Lanka, he
excelled in school while selling newspapers to support
his father.
Kalam went on to study aeronautical
engineering at the prestigious Madras Institute of
Technology. He never received a Ph D, but he is always
referred to as "doctor" in India, having received 30
honorary doctorates and the country's three highest
civilian honors. His only visit to the United States
came in 1963, when he spent about five months touring
NASA rocket centers.
After working on the team
that developed India's first satellite vehicle in the
1970s, Kalam ran a program that developed five missiles
to counter Chinese and Pakistani systems in the 1980s.
When the BJP took office in 1998, he served as
scientific adviser to the ministry of defense and
lobbied for nuclear tests.
Indian tests that
year set off an international outcry and an arms race
with Pakistan. But Kalam argues that nuclear weapons are
a deterrent that helped prevent another war between
India and Pakistan this spring.
India conducted
five nuclear tests in May 1998, announcing unambiguously
its nuclear capacity. Since then, both India and
Pakistan have adopted voluntary moratoriums on further
nuclear testing, which still remain in effect. There was
hope that both countries would sign the Comprehensive
Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), but the US Senate’s rejection of
the treaty and President George W Bush’s opposition to
the CTBT dimmed the prospects for Indian action.
The US sought statements by India to define its
aim of maintaining a "credible minimum deterrent" at the
lowest possible levels. But the nuclear doctrine issued
by India’s semi-official National Security Advisory
Board in August 1999 suggested no end to India’s nuclear
plans, though that remains in the draft stages.
According to the doctrine, the authority to use
nuclear weapons rests with the prime minister and with a
"designated successor". The Indian military has yet to
be fully included in the country’s nuclear planning and
development. Interservice rivalry has delayed the
creation of the post of chief of defense staff to
control the country’s nuclear forces.
Two
primary factors drive India's nuclear program: the need
to balance China's growing nuclear arsenal and the
ongoing conflict with Pakistan over Kashmir. The Indian
government released a proposed nuclear doctrine in 1999.
This calls for the use of nuclear weapons only in
response to a nuclear attack - in other words a
no-first-use policy - and says that ultimately India's
nuclear forces will be based in a triad of aircraft,
mobile land-based missiles and sea-based forces. The
doctrine states that India intends, through a
combination of redundant systems, mobility, dispersion
and deception, to heighten the survivability of its
nuclear arsenal. Despite its ambition to deploy a
nuclear triad, today India can deliver nuclear weapons
only by missile or aircraft.
India has two types
of missiles; the Prithvi and the Agni, each of which has
several variants. The Prithvi missiles have ranges under
500 kilometers and are liquid-fueled. In January 2002,
India test fired a solid-fuel Agni missile. With a range
of 700 kilometers, it bridges a gap between
shorter-range Prithvi missiles and longer-range variants
of the Agni. Versions of the Agni with ranges up to
5,000 kilometers are being developed.
India also
has several aircraft that could be outfitted to deliver
nuclear bombs. It is not clear which, if any, have been
modified for nuclear delivery. India's 147 MiG-27s and
88 Jaguars would require little or no modification to
deliver nuclear weapons. In addition, India has 150
Mig-21 fighters, 64 MiG-29s, and 36 Mirage 2000s, which
could all be upgraded to carry nuclear weapons.
Indian attempts to complete the submarine-based
third of its nuclear triad have been beset by technical
difficulties, and success on this front remains a long
way off.
According to the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, India possesses the components to
deploy a small number of nuclear weapons within a few
days and has produced enough weapons-grade plutonium to
produce between 50 and 90 nuclear weapons. The Natural
Resources Defense Council estimates that India has
approximately 30-35 warheads.
India probably
keeps its nuclear delivery vehicles separate from its
warheads, although further deterioration in its
relationship with Pakistan could lead to changes in this
policy.
Although tensions have eased a bit since
the standoff with Pakistan in May and June, the
situation is still dangerous. Pakistan's refusal to
institute a no-first use policy for its nuclear weapons
(unlike India) is designed to keep Indians guessing
about when Pakistan might use its nuclear weapons,
preventing a major conventional attack against the
inferior Pakistani army.
In February, Pakistani
General Khalid Kidwai, chief of Pakistan's strategic
plans division, which controls Pakistan's nuclear
weapons, said that should India threaten to conquer a
large portion of Pakistan (including Azad, Pakistan's
portion of Kashmir), destroy the Pakistani army,
strangle Pakistan economically, or politically
destabilize Pakistan, Pakistan might use nuclear
weapons.
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